TBL Networks, The Blinky Light

This is the Live Blog of the VMworld 2012 General Session. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

CEO Paul Maritz is on the stage, introduced by Chief Marketing Officer, Rick Jackson. Statistics say that in 2012 60% of all x86 workloads worldwide are virtualized. In 2008 we were asking what is the cloud. In 2012, we are asking how do we transform our operations into a cloud infrastructure.
Maritz continues to say that we need to look at new ways to provide access to information to users. It’s all about giving the information to users whenever, wherever they are and in the context that they need. IT transformation happens in three broad categories:

• Infrastructure – Moving from physical to virtual to cloud
• Application transformation – Moving from desktop to web. Providing big data in manageable contexts.
• End User Computing – Moving from desktop / laptop access to any device, anywhere. Mobile users.

Paul Maritz has officially announced that he is handing over the stewardship of VMware to Pat Gelsinger as new CEO. Pat Gelsinger is on the stage now. He is talking about the Software Defined Datacenter.

As much as we have progressed, we still have silos: Windows, Linux, Databases, Mission Critical, Big Data, HPC. The Software Defined Datacenter is about bringing all of these different silos under one unified infrastructure / datacenter operating system. VMware is announcing the vCloud Suite to deliver and manage the Software Defined Datacenter.

VMware is announcing vSphere 5.1 today. There will be no more vRAM entitlement. vSphere is priced per CPU with no limitations. VMware has acquired:

• DynamicOps – Process automation
• Nicira – Software Defined Networking

Mobile users:

• View / Mirage – Centrally manage all pc’s (physical and virtual)
• Horizon – Broker for access, apps, desktop, across all devices

Pat Gelsinger has introduced Steve Herrod, VMware CTO. He is now on the stage. He will be talking about the new vCloud Suite. We need to move towards provisioning the infrastructure as easily as we can provision virtual machines. This is enabled by the vCloud Suite.

Compute Advancements:

New vSphere 5.1 release large VM support:
• 64 vCPUs on single VM
• 1TB/VM
• Over 1 million IOPS per VM

Software vendors are moving from a “not-supported” virtualization stance to “only being supported as virtualized on VMware.” This is a testament to the performance and stability of vSphere. Epic healthcare was used as an example.

Storage / Availability Advancements:

• Enhanced vMotion – vMotion without shared storage (vMotion and svMotion at the simultaneously)
• Virtual Volumes (vVols) – Pair virtual machines with arrays to communicate directly with virtual machine level.
• Virtual Flash – More advancement in flash technology and its uses.
• Virtual SAN – Creating SANs out of direct-attached storage.

Networking / Security Advancements:

• vSphere Distributed Switch – Health Check, Configuration backup and restore.
• Applications should be able to pick up the resources that they need automatically.
• VXLAN is shipping with the 5.1 release.
• Edge is a layer 3 gateway service.
• Cisco Nexus 1000v integrates with vCloud Director.

Management Advancements (vCloud Suite):

• Create Clouds – Log into vCloud Director as the unified management interface. Easy visual cues help you determine the state of your virtual datacenters at a glance. Partner plug-ins are available to gain even more information and automation within vCloud Director. vCloud API’s allow partners to build their own “As A Service” offerings (e.g. Backup As A Service).
• Deploy Applications – Aplication Director enables this. Take application blueprints and deploy full apps from them.
• Ongoing Operations – vCenter Operations Manager enables management of ongoing operations. Quickly assess Health, Risk, and Efficiency of your virtual datacenters.

The rest of the session is dedicated to a demo of the vCloud Director Suite and how to create virtual datacenters, deploy applications, and manage ongoing operations. I’ll be covering many of the sessions that I’m attending throughout the week at VMworld 2012. Thanks for reading.